Prologue:
In last week's feature
I began investigating the history of the world's best-selling board game,
uncovering a trail of controversy surrounding Monopoly beginning in 1936,
the year that Parker Brothers purchased the rights to the game from Charles
Darrow.

This week the
story continues with the 1974 lawsuit brought by the General Mills Fun
Group, once owners of Parker Brothers and Monopoly ®, against Ralph
Anspach, the inventor/designer of the Anti-Monopoly® board game and
Ralph Anspach's monopolization lawsuit against the current owners of Monopoly ®.

Go straight
to jail, do not collect $200 or say anything vaguely similar.

Dr.
Ralph Anspach, economics professor and inventor of a board game called
Anti-Monopoly, put his product on the market in 1974 with great sales
prospects. Parker Brothers and General Mills threatened to sue anyone involved
with the sale of Anti-Monopoly for infringement of its trademark of
the word Monopoly. Dr. Anspach (a man of relatively modest salary) found
himself facing a lawsuit against the 57th largest corporation in America.

Carl
Person, a New York based lawyer, was willing to take on the case on
a contingency basis to help Dr. Anspach fight what turned into a ten-year
court battle. Twice a lower federal court ruled against Anti-Monopoly and at one point 40,000 Anti-Monopoly games were buried in a Minnesota
landfill by court order.
Ralph Anspach mortgaged his home to pay the court
costs and faced a loss of his home. Then the U.S. Supreme Court handed
down a victory in 1984. Ralph Anspach was back in business and l/2 million copies
of Anti-Monopoly sold in the same year.

Anti-Monopoly
Game Card

But the game
was not over yet, the country's largest toy manufacturer, Hasbro Inc. went
on a toy manufacturer's shopping spree and bought Parker Brothers, soon
after Ralph Anspach's victory in supreme court. Hasbro Inc. become the new owners
of Monopoly and with the purchase of many other board-game producers,
Hasbro Inc. gained control of at least 80% of the American board-game market.
A deal was signed between two giant toy retailers, Toys 'R' Us and Kmart,
and Hasbro. The fine print included an agreement for the two chains not
to buy any competing product. Ralph Anspach and Anti-Monopoly suddenly
faced serious marketing problems.

Ralph Anspach
protested to the Federal Trade Commission with no results. He has gone
back to court, with a monopolization case pending, Anti-Monopoly Inc. v.
Hasbro, Inc., Toys 'R' Us and Kmart Corp. Carl Person is again representing Ralph
Anspach in court.

His complaint
charges that the defendant Hasbro, Inc. has been allowed by the Federal
Trade Commission to acquire by merger over 80% of the board-game market
and has funneled over 50% of that entire U.S. market through the defendants
Toys 'R' Us and Kmart. He also claims that Hasbro, Inc. used a variety
of anti-competitive practices, including predatory price discrimination,
to destroy the network of wholesalers, retailers and independent sales
representatives. Small toy manufacturers have to depend on that network
to bring products to market.

So far, the
lower court judge has refused to even let Anspach go to trial, granting
summary judgment to the defendants.
Ralph Anspach published a book
on his experiences and I heartily recommend reading it. It is an amazing
story.
Ralph Anspach deserves the real credit for unearthing the true history
of Monopoly while developing his defense case against the Parker Brothers'
infringement suit.

"Here's a sidelight
to the
Brady
book. I broke the story on the real history and the Parker Brothers/Darrow
fraud in a debate with Maxine on a major New York talk show. Maxine was
taken a back by the Quaker game I had brought to the show. But she
is quick on her feet so she said something like who cares about who invented
the game; the only thing which matters is that Monopoly is the greatest
game ever invented.

I responded
by saying that Monopoly had evolved in the public domain for thirty years
but once it fell into private ownership, its evolution stopped while chess
evolved for two thousand years before it found its present form. So how
do we know that the Quaker version of Monopoly, stolen from the public
domain, cannot be improved upon? Maxine answered that Monopoly was perfect
and no one could improve it.

On the flight
home to San Francisco, I worked out the details of the Anti-Monopoly game
now on the market in response to Brady's challenge. Whether Anti-Monopoly
is an improved version has not yet been tested since Monopoly excluded
us from the board game market. But the web is still free so we will see
when we put Anti-Monopoly out on the web." - Ralph Anspach